Month: January 2019

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on January 16, 2019, that U.S. newspaper reports about an FBI investigation of whether President Trump was working on Moscow’s behalf reflected a plunge in journalism standards. Lavrov dismissed the idea as “absurd.”

It seems to me that this is a projection. Russia has a muzzled journalism. Its journalists lack independence. Even more so, Russian journalists have been murdered in recent times.

Criminality reigns in Russia from the highest reaches down. No law enforcement agency in Russia can investigate alleged criminality, in contrast to the U.S.’s FBI.

We commonly use the expression “the whole nine yards” to mean absolutely everything. The origin of this expression stems from the military. As Alan Axelrod writes,

The length of a complete standard .50-mm machine gun ammo belt: twenty-seven feet.
To feed the gunner the entire belt was to give him (or the enemy target) “the whole nine yards”; hence the popular expression for giving, getting, or doing absolutely everything.

from – Alan Axelrod, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: the Real Language of the Modern American Military. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, p. 205.